In just his second career WHL game, Cooper Williams gave the Saskatoon Blades their first goal scored on home ice this season as part of a dominant 9-3 victory over the Swift Current Broncos on Sept. 21.

In the three months since that milestone goal, he’s done little to slow down, balancing confidence in his on-ice abilities with a genuine surprise at how his junior career has begun in Saskatoon.

“All of the boys support me no matter what,” Williams said. “Even if I’m not doing good one game, they’re still picking me up on the bench and it’s just awesome having everyone around.”

Through 30 games with the Blades so far this season, the Calgary teenager has racked up 22 points, which places him fifth in overall team scoring at just 16 years old.

Not only is his production turning heads in north-central Saskatchewan, but across the WHL as well with Williams trailing only Everett Silvertips phenom Landon DuPont and Brandon Wheat Kings rookie star Jaxon Jacobson in scoring for players 16 years of age or younger.

“He’s unbelievable,” said Blades forward Tyler Parr. “I’ve played with a lot of great players in this league and growing up, he’s easily one of the smartest players I’ve ever played with. He sees things that are pretty impressive for a 16-year-old and I just can’t wait to see where he goes.”

That cerebral approach to the game is also being noticed by Blades head coach Dan DaSilva, who said Williams has been able to create opportunities for himself primarily by using his brain.

Something he added doesn’t always come easy for players his age.

“The biggest thing for him is he’s very, very smart,” said DaSilva. “He has a high hockey IQ, he’s in the right position, he knows where to go on the ice both offensively and defensively. That’s his biggest asset, I would say… his ability to think and read plays. He’s just not afraid, he goes out there and plays the same way every single night.”

It’s not just the offensive game that Williams is starting to put together at his young age, as he spent the summer working on the defensive side of the puck.

That off-season training has allowed him to take his fair share of face-offs in the defensive zone and is slowly gaining the trust of DaSilva and his staff.

“Last year, I wasn’t very good at it and I knew that,” Williams said. “I came into this year trying to get better at it and develop in the summer with it. I came in thinking that’s going to help my game a lot and it has so far.”

In the early stages of his junior career, Williams is pointing to veterans like Rowan Calvert and Brandon Lisowsky as Blades who have been mentors over the course of the season.

The latter of whom recently moved into seventh all-time in franchise goal scoring and picked up the 250th point of his WHL career.

“He had an opportunity and he took it,” Lisowsky said. “I think he’s going to be an awesome player in this league. You can already tell he can make plays, he’s got a good stick, he can skate well, he’s a big body at 16 . He’s going to be a player for the Blades in the future.”

Williams’ fiery start to the season has helped Saskatoon climb into first place in both the East Division and Eastern Conference with a 17-9-2-2 record, sitting one point up on the Medicine Hat Tigers.

With the holiday break approaching Williams does have a to do list for the second half, in continuing his progression as one of the brightest up and comers in the ‘Bridge City.’

“Just keeping up the point pace but also the defensive pace,” said Williams. “Keeping that plus-minus up, that always helps and trying to do anything to help the team win.”

The Blades wrap up the unofficial first half of the WHL season on Sunday hosting the Brandon Wheat Kings at 4 p.m., before beginning their holiday break, which stretches until Dec. 27.

© 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

British Columbia business owner Joe Chaput will spend $5,500 a month on security guards during the holiday season and plans on upgrading his store’s video camera system for around $5,000 more.

He’s not selling luxury brands or expensive jewels.

Chaput sells cheese, and at Christmas, cheese is a hot commodity.

He is the co-owner of specialty cheese store les amis du Fromage, with two locations in Vancouver.

While cheeselifting is rare in their Kitsilano store, the outlet in East Vancouver is hit in waves, with nothing happening for a month, then three of four people trying to steal their inventory within a week.

“Sometimes, you miss it. Sometimes, you catch it. The way shoplifters behave … they tend to gravitate toward expensive things,” said Chaput.

Expensive cheese is on shoplifters’ Christmas list, he said.

“They tend to do the classic examples of staying away from customer service and trying to go to a different part of the store so they can be left alone to steal.”

Chaput isn’t alone. Police say food-related crimes on are the rise in Canada and as prices climb for items such as cheese and butter, they become lucrative on the black market for organized crime groups, not to mention theft for local resale.

Sylvain Charlebois, the director of Dalhousie University’s Agri-food Analytics Lab, said a black market tends to emerge as soon as food prices surge.

“Organized crime will steal anything (if) they know they can sell it and so, they probably would have known who their clients are before even stealing anything at all, and that’s how a black market is organized,” said Charlebois.

He said he believes there are two categories of people shoplifting — those who do so out of desperation because they can’t afford the food, or organized criminals, profiting from sales on the black market.

Mounties in North Vancouver made cheesy headlines when they ran into a man with a cart of stolen cheese in the middle of the night in September.

The cheese, valued at $12,800, was from a nearby Whole Foods Store. While the cheese was recovered, it had to be disposed of because it hadn’t been refrigerated.

Const. Mansoor Sahak, with the North Vancouver RCMP, said officers believe cheese is targeted because it’s “profitable to resell.”

“If they are drug addicts, they will commit further crimes with that or feed their drug habits. It’s a vicious cycle,” said Sahak.

Sahak said meat is also a top target for grocery thieves, with store losses sometimes in the thousands.

“So, we’re not surprised that this happened,” said Sahak.

Police in Ontario have been chasing down slippery shoplifters going after butter.

Scott Tracey, a spokesman with Guelph Police Service, said there have been eight or nine butter thefts over the last year, including one theft last December worth $1,000.

In October, two men walked into a local grocer and filled their carts with cases of butter valued at $936, and four days later a Guelph grocer lost four cases valued at $958.

Tracey said he has looked at online marketplaces and found listings by people selling 20 or 30 pounds of butter at a time.

“Clearly, somebody didn’t accidentally buy 30 extra pounds of butter. So, they must have come from somewhere,” said Tracey, “I think at this point it appears to be the black market is where it’s headed.”

He said the thefts seem to be organized, with two or three people working together in each case.

Police in Brantford, Ont., are also investigating the theft of about $1,200 worth of butter from a store on Nov. 4.

Charlebois said retailers could invest in prevention technologies like electronic tags, but putting them on butter or cheese is rare.

He said up until recently grocery store theft has been a “taboo subject for many years.”

Stores didn’t wanted to talk about thefts because they didn’t want to alarm people but now they feel they need to build awareness about what is “becoming a huge problem,” said Charlebois.

Chaput, the cheese store owner, said he had been running the East Vancouver store for 15 years while managing the store in Kitsilano for 30 years, and he loves his customers.

“It’s really one of the best parts of our businesses, seeing familiar faces and making new customers. It’s why we come to work, really. Partly it’s the cheese, and partly it’s the people,” said Chaput.

He said his strategy to combat would-be thieves is to give them extra customer service to make it harder for them to steal.

He admits, however, that the shoplifting causes him stress.

“It’s challenging. You’re busy trying to run your business day to day and take care of customers and take care of employees. Having to deal with criminals, just kind of scratches away. It can be a bit exhausting,” said Chaput.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 15, 2024.

© 2024 The Canadian Press

Two Russian oil tankers have been seriously damaged following a storm in the Kerch Strait, spilling oil and sparking an emergency rescue operation, Russian officials told state news outlets Sunday.

Some reports said at least one of the vessels later sank.

The Volgoneft-212 tanker, which was carrying a crew of 13 and a cargo of fuel oil, ran aground and had its bow torn away, the Tass news agency reported, citing the country’s Emergency Situations Ministry. Officials said that one crew member died, but that a rescue operation was able to evacuate the remaining sailors.

A second tanker, the Volgoneft-239, was also damaged and was adrift with 14 crewmembers on board. It later ran aground 80 meters from shore close to the port of Taman in Russia’s Krasnodar region, where a rescue operation is being planned, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.

Together, the two ships were carrying almost 9,000 tons of mazut, a heavy, low-grade fuel oil, Tass reported. Social media footage from the scene showed a black slick of liquid among the waves.

Russian officials confirmed the oil spill, but said that experts were still working to assess its full impact and extent.

The Kerch Strait separates the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula from Russia and is an important global shipping route, providing passage from the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea.

It has also been a key point of conflict between Russia and Ukraine after Moscow annexed the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. In 2016, Ukraine took Moscow to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, where it accused Russia of trying to illegally seize control of the area. In 2021, Russia closed the strait for several months.

© 2024 The Canadian Press

New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt says “everything is on the table” in responding to U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s tariff threat, but cautioned she won’t take actions that could hurt her province.

Her comments came as Ontario Premier Doug Ford warned his province could cut off energy exports to the U.S. in response to the proposed tariffs.

Asked by The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson about Ford’s proposal, Holt stressed certain actions could cause “significant trouble” for the province, but they were still “preparing for the worst” with the president-elect’s actions.

“We don’t want to cut off our nose to spite our face,” she said. “There would be significant trouble caused to New Brunswickers if we stopped selling products into the U.S.”

She noted Trump’s tariffs would already make exporting products to the U.S. more challenging, but “cutting off” the province’s largest customer, such as the petroleum products it sends to the U.S. would create more issues.

According to a report by the New Brunswick government released in July, the U.S. received 92.1 per cent of the province’s exports in 2023.

In her interview, Holt said her government was doing analysis to determine how they could retaliate with the least impact to New Brunswick but most to the U.S., and in particular the places the “Trump administration is most sensitive to.”

“We’re looking at all of the different things that we import in from the U.S., as well as the critical things that we send to them to prepare a strong retaliatory strategy that we will have ready in case and we hope we won’t have to use it,” Holt said.

At the same time, the premier said government officials are trying to make the case to Trump that his proposed tariffs would hurt American consumers and its economy — though tariffs would be put on Canadian products coming into the U.S., American consumers would see higher prices for some of those items.

Tariffs are a tax imposed by governments on imports from other countries. They can be sweeping, or specific. Importers pay the tariffs, then typically pass that cost along to consumers who see it in the form of higher prices.

“We’re going to be making that case, but we’re preparing for the worst,” she said.

Holt and Ford, along with Canada’s other premiers, met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to discuss the 25-per cent tariffs Trump has threatened to impose on all Canadian imports on his first day in office, which is Jan. 20, 2025.

Following that meeting, Ford said they would “cut off” millions of American residents living in border states, stating he would “turn off the lights” to about 1.5 million Americans. Government sources told Global News the province is also considering restricting imports of U.S.-made alcohol and limiting exports of Canadian critical minerals to the U.S.

In the interview, Holt said Ottawa has responded “in a really serious way,” noting actions to strengthen the border. But she also said her province is also looking to get more detail from Ottawa on what investment from that plan will come to New Brunswick in relation to the Port of St. John.

She said there’s been more and more containers coming into the port every day, and the Canada Border and Services Agency (CBSA) installation in New Brunswick at the port are feeling strain and need the ability to grow. While specifics are being worked out, Holt told Global News this week that more border security investments, like joint RCMP and DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) efforts are being looked into.

© 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

Eggnog chocolate truffle

1.5kg Ivoire Chocolate
250g 36% Cream
188g Invert Sugar
900g Eggnog
2.5 Vanilla Beans 658g
164g Butter
175g Jamaican Rum
3g Nutmeg

Combine eggnog, inverted sugar and cream into a pot
Bring to a boil and set aside
Pour over white chocolate and emulsify together until smooth
Cool ganache to 35 degrees F
Emulsify butter and rum in until ultra smooth
Pipe into truffle shells

© 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

In churches across long-stifled Syria, Christians marked the first Sunday services since Bashar Assad’s ouster in an air of transformation. Some worshippers were in tears. Others clasped their hands in prayer.

“They are promising us that government will be formed soon and, God willing, things will become better because we got rid of the tyrant,” said one worshipper, Jihad Raffoul.

“Today, our prayers are for a new page in Syria’s future,” said another, Suzan Barakat.

To help those efforts, the U.N. envoy for Syria called for a quick end to Western sanctions as the country’s new leaders and regional and global powers discuss the way forward.

Syria has been under sanctions by the United States, the European Union and others for years as a result of Assad’s brutal response to what began as peaceful anti-government protests in 2011 and spiraled into civil war.

The rebel alliance that ousted Assad and sent him into exile in Russia a week ago faces a nation deeply isolated by the sanctions, which compounded Syria’s economic troubles.

But other challenges also complicate rebuilding. The new transitional leadership has not laid out a clear vision of how the country will be governed, and the main group behind the offensive remains designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., which nevertheless has begun making direct contact with it.

The U.N. envoy to Syria, Geir Pedersen, told reporters in Damascus that the rebels’ stunningly fast offensive should be followed by a rapid international response.

“We can hopefully see a quick end to the sanctions so that we can see really a rallying around building of Syria,” he said.

Parts of Syria’s biggest cities are damaged or destroyed by years of fighting. Reconstruction has been stymied largely by the sanctions that aimed to prevent rebuilding of infrastructure and property in government-held areas in the absence of a political solution.

The U.N. envoy was meeting with officials from the new interim government set up by the former opposition forces who toppled Assad, led by the Islamic militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS. Officials in Washington have indicated that the Biden administration is considering removing the group’s terror designation.

Over the weekend, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken attended an emergency meeting in Jordan with 12 foreign ministers from the Arab League, Turkey and top officials from the European Union and United Nations on how Syria should be run after a half-century of Assad family rule.

They agreed that the new government should respect the rights of minorities and women, prevent terror groups from taking hold, ensure humanitarian aid reaches those in need and secure and destroy any remaining Assad-era chemical weapons.

Syria’s interim government is set to rule until March, but it has not made clear the process under which a new permanent administration would replace it. Arab foreign ministers have called for U.N.-supervised elections based on a new constitution approved by Syrians.

“We need to get the political process underway that is inclusive of all Syrians,” Pedersen said. “That process obviously needs to be led by the Syrians themselves.”

He also called for “ justice and accountability for crimes” committed during the war, as some families continued to search for the tens of thousands of people that Assad’s government had placed in prisons and detention facilities.

Many Syrian Christians, who made up 10% of the population before Syria’s civil war, had either fled the country or supported Assad out of fear of Islamist insurgents. Last Sunday’s church services were canceled.

“We were scared of the events taking place,” said Ibrahim Shahin, a Catholic church supervisor.

But this Sunday, doors reopened and bells rang out.

In another sign of Syrians’ yearning for normalcy after the whirlwind of events, schools in Damascus reopened Sunday for the first time since the insurgents marched in the capital.

At Nahla Zaidan school in the Mezzah neighborhood, teachers hoisted the three-starred revolutionary flag in place of the former government’s two-starred one.

“Although I think some of them are afraid, they came to build Syria and to live the victories of this country,” said Maysoun Al-Ali, the school director. “God willing, there will be more development, more security and more construction in this beloved country.”

© 2024 The Canadian Press

One of the world’s smallest and most endangered turtle species was found on the shores Quebec’s Magdalen Islands last week in a first for the province.

The discovery of the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle has veterinarians and sea turtle conservationists worried many more of its kind will swim north because of climate change.

“Sometimes we see leatherback turtles, but these kinds of turtles are unheard of,” said veterinarian Jean-Simon Richard, who hails from the Magdalen Islands but spends much of the year outside the archipelago.

People on the islands sometimes call him when they find beached marine animals, usually dolphins, whales and seals.

But last Saturday he was contacted by someone who had found what Richard said is the most endangered sea turtle species in the world while walking on the beach of Grosse-Île, one of the islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

“We weren’t sure it was still alive or dead because sometimes they become a little paralyzed by the cold, hypothermic shock and it could take up to 24 hours before they are revived,” said Richard, who is also the president of Musée des Îles de la Madeleine, a mobile museum dedicated to the region’s archeological and natural history.

However, attempts to revive the turtle proved unsuccessful.

Richard believes the turtle swam probably further north because of warming water temperatures and likely died from hypothermia. The animal currently sits in a freezer and will be sent for a necropsy. After the cause of death is determined, its skeleton will feature in the museum.

It’s not the only animal from a tropical climate to wash up on the islands this year for the first time, he said, explaining that a bottlenose dolphin was found on the Magdalen Islands in July.

Kathleen Martin, executive director of the Canadian Sea Turtle Network, said the discovery is significant because Kemp’s ridley turtles, which typically migrate from the Gulf of Mexico, are in peril.

She said the species has been spotted in Southwest Nova Scotia and The Bay of Fundy but has never been found in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, alive or dead.

“It is highly unusual for that species to be so far north to be in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence at all, let alone that far north in the Gulf,” she said.

Although Martin cautioned against drawing definitive conclusions from a single carcass, she said the Canadian ecosystem will play a more critical role for sea turtle habitats going forward.

“We’re an important place for endangered sea turtles and we’ll become, I believe, increasingly important as the years go by because of climate change because the species will be pushing their ranges further and further north into Canadian waters,” said Martin.

“We’re going to see, I believe, more turtles like this little Kemp’s Ridley showing up. We’re going to have to do more to keep these animals safe.”

© 2024 The Canadian Press

Officials in some Quebec municipalities ravaged by past flooding say they fear possible financial repercussions for residents as the province prepares to introduce new flood maps that would greatly expand areas deemed at risk.

Five years ago, when a dike gave way in Ste-Marthe-sur-le-Lac, Que., the rush of water forced more than 6,000 people from their homes. Residents have since struggled to rebuild their lives in the town just west of Montreal, but Mayor François Robillard says the new flood zone maps are sparking more frustration.

“Citizens are really shocked right now …. because it’s going to have an effect on their daily lives,” he said in an interview.

Quebec’s current flood maps designate two risk zones for river and coastal areas — flooding is expected either within 20 years or somewhere between 20 and 100 years. Under the new system expected to be rolled out in 2025, there will be four categories of risk: low, moderate, high and very high. Each category has its own rules regarding construction and renovation.

For instance, a property owner in a very high-risk area would not be allowed to build a new house on the property or rebuild a house that had been destroyed by flooding.

Robillard says the preliminary maps he has seen put 2,000 of his town’s homes in flood zones, up from just two now. The drastic shift has residents in his town of about 20,000 residents scrambling to understand the impact such designations will have on their properties.

“In 2019, the dike broke and there was a flood, so from that moment the government authorized everyone, all the people in Ste-Marthe-sur-le-Lac who were affected, to rebuild without the restrictions of a flood zone,” he said. With a new dike in place, residents thought they were safe.

“If they’d known that four-and-a-half years later that we were going to declare a flood zone … people wouldn’t necessarily have invested here,” Robillard said. “They might have taken the government’s money and reinvested it elsewhere,” he said, calling the government’s change of course “nonsense.”

The Quebec Environment Department did not respond to a request for comment.

In June, the department estimated that under the new maps, more than three times as many Quebecers would find themselves living in at-risk zones — from the current 22,000 homes to 77,000. Then, last month, the department said the figure would likely be revised downward.

Just west of Ste-Marthe-sur-le-Lac on Lake of Two Mountains, Pointe-Calumet is also protected by a dike. It has not flooded since the 1970s and Mayor Sonia Fontaine says it has not previously been considered a flood zone. However, the updated flood maps would put over 97 per cent of the territory in a flood zone, she said.

Fontaine accused the province of leaving people in the dark and fearful that their property values are about to drop.

“Since June, people don’t know what to do with their homes here,” she said, adding that the impact is being felt even before the new maps come into effect. “I meet people every week, people who are crying, people who can’t sell their homes today.”

Both Fontaine and Robillard want the government to remove proposed flood zone designations for their municipalities and create a separate category for municipalities that are protected by dikes.

Frustration over flood maps has taken a darker turn in the lower Laurentians region of the province. Sylvie D’Amours, the Coalition Avenir Québec member for Mirabel, announced in October she was closing her riding office for safety reasons. Someone firing what police described as a pellet gun had shattered a window in the office, and D’Amours suggested anger over her government’s plan to update flood zone maps as a possible motive.

Beauceville, south of Quebec City, has also had its share of floods. In 2019 an ice jam on the Chaudière River burst free, sending water and chunks of ice through the heart of its historic downtown. Some 100 buildings had to be demolished.

Serge Vallée, the town’s general manager, said 59 buildings in Beauceville are currently located in flood zones.

“What we’re afraid of is that it’s going to increase with the new maps,” he said, adding that even a low-risk designation could have a negative effect on their mortgages and insurance.

Joanna Eyquem, who specializes in climate-resilient infrastructure at University of Waterloo’s Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation, said poor communication and a lack of readily accessible information has contributed to the outcry in Quebec.

Quebecers should not be getting such information only from the provincial and municipal governments but also from insurance companies and mortgage providers, which have their own flood zone maps, she said.

However, Eyquem pointed out that dikes can be breached and the risk to towns like Ste-Marthe-sur-le-Lac and Pointe-Calumet shouldn’t be ignored.

Although the new mapping system is a positive step forward, Canada lags far behind such countries as the United States and the United Kingdom in countrywide mapping, she said, adding that the new Quebec maps do not even account for heavy rainfall, which will be an increasing source of flooding due to climate change.

© 2024 The Canadian Press

A tornado near a mall in central California swept up cars, uprooted trees and sent several people to the hospital. In San Francisco, authorities issued the first-ever tornado warning.

Elsewhere, inclement weather plagued areas of the U.S., with dangerous conditions including heavy snow in upstate New York, a major ice storm in Midwest states and severe weather warnings around Lake Tahoe.

The ice storm beginning Friday evening created treacherous driving conditions across Iowa and eastern Nebraska Friday and into Saturday and prompted temporary closures of Interstate 80 after numerous cars and trucks slid off the road. In upstate New York, more than 33 inches (84 centimeters) was reported near Orchard Park, which is often a landing point for lake-effect snow.

On Saturday, a tornado touched down near a shopping mall in Scotts Valley, California, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) south of San Francisco, around 1:40 p.m. The tornado overturned cars and toppled trees and utility poles, the National Weather Service said. The Scotts Valley Police Department said several people were injured and taken to hospitals.

Some trees toppled onto cars and streets and damaged roofs in San Francisco. The damage was being assessed to determine if the city was indeed hit by a tornado, which had not occurred since 2005, according to the weather service.

Roger Gass, a meteorologist in the weather service’s office in Monterey, California, said the warning of a possible tornado in San Francisco was a first for the city, noting an advanced alert did not go out before the last tornado struck nearly 20 years ago.

“I would guess there wasn’t a clear signature on radar for a warning in 2005,” said Gass, who was not there at the time.

The fast-moving storm prompted warnings for residents to take shelter, but few people have basements in the area.

“The biggest thing that we tell people in the city is to put as many walls between you and the outside as possible,” Meteorologist Dalton Behringer said.

More than a foot (30 centimeters) of snow fell at some Lake Tahoe ski resorts, and a 112-mph (181-kph) gust of wind was recorded at the Mammoth Mountain resort south of Yosemite National Park, according to the weather service’s office in Reno, Nevada. Up to 3 feet (91 centimeters) of snow was forecast for Sierra Nevada mountaintops.

The Tahoe Live music festival at Palisades Tahoe ski resort in California was expected to go ahead as planned Saturday and Sunday in spite of a winter storm warning for the area. Lil Wayne was scheduled to perform Saturday night, with Diplo as the headliner on Sunday, the festival’s website said.

A winter storm warning was set to expire at 10 p.m. Saturday, but an avalanche warning remained in effect into the following night for elevations above 8,000 feet (about 2,400 meters) around Tahoe.

Interstate 80 was closed along an 80-mile (130-kilometer) stretch from Applegate, California, to the Nevada line just west of Reno on Saturday. The California Highway Patrol reopened the road in the afternoon for passenger vehicles with chains or four-wheel drive and snow tires.

The severe weather in the Midwest resulted in at least one death. The Washington County Sheriff’s office in Nebraska said a 57-year-old woman died after she lost control of her pickup on Highway 30 near Arlington and hit an oncoming truck. The other driver sustained minor injuries.

Businesses announced plans to open late Saturday as temperatures rose high enough in the afternoon to melt the ice in most places.

“Luckily some warmer air is moving in behind this to make it temporary,” said Dave Cousins, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s office in Davenport, Iowa.

Tens of thousands of people in western Washington state lost electricity Saturday as the system delivered rain and gusty winds, local news outlets reported.

© 2024 The Canadian Press

Bizarre and personal photos of ousted Syrian President Bashar Assad have surfaced from his abandoned residences, sparking ridicule among Syrians who only until recently were persecuted for criticizing his leadership.

The images, reportedly discovered in photo albums from Assad’s mansions in the hills of Damascus and Aleppo, painted an unflattering portrait of Bashar and his father, Hafez Assad, who had ruled Syria with an iron grip for decades. They stripped away the carefully constructed image that the Assad family had cultivated for decades.

One photo featured Hafez Assad in his underwear, striking a bodybuilder-like pose. Other images showed Bashar Assad in a Speedo flexing his biceps; astride a yellow motorcycle in his briefs; perched on a handcycle, also in his briefs; and staring blankly in a kitchen, wearing only white underwear and a sleeveless undershirt.

Social media footage showed Syrians touring the Assads’ opulent estates, revealing extravagant decor, jacuzzis and other lavish possessions out of reach of ordinary people living amid civil war since 2011. Fueled by decades of persecution and a desire for vengeance, people stripped the mansions of valuables and exposed Assad’s private world, including some of his photo collections.

The unbecoming images of Assad in various states of undress and odd scenarios quickly went viral, turning into an object of mockery. For many Syrians, who had endured forced imprisonment, displacement and oppression under the Assad dynasty, these photos served as both a spectacle and a moment of catharsis.

“What is it with the Assad family and being photographed in their underwear? Highly interested in knowing the fantasy behind,” journalist Hussam Hammoud wrote on X.

One particularly peculiar shot showed Bashar in a Speedo aboard a boat, surrounded by other people. Another depicted him on a balcony overlooking the sea, teasing a girl sitting on his shoulders.

In one photo, taken in a mountainous setting, Bashar Assad is pictured with a group of people, including his reportedly maternal cousin, Ihab Makhlouf, who is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with an image of Hitler.

One video on social media showed a man flipping through hundreds of photos in an album, featuring images from family occasions. One photo showed a young Bashar in a suit and his wife Asmaa in a white dress, reportedly from their engagement ceremony, as he places a ring on her finger. Another image captured a topless Bashar posing with a camera, as if taking a picture.

© 2024 The Canadian Press